AI Can Do Harvard Business School Analysis Instantly

Do you want to out compete companies a hundred times your size using free AI tools? Of course you do. And I’m not exaggerating. There are ways that you can more or less recreate a Harvard Business School style strategic analyst function in your business using free tools. Not even the stuff you pay ten bucks for, just the free version. In this video, I will show you how. And I got to tell you, I am the opposite of an AI evangelist. I don’t trust a lot of AI. You have to fact check it. The hallucinations are dodgy. Uh the management of these companies do not inspire my confidence. But the pattern recognition capabilities of these new large language models are crazy. You can’t trust them to think for you, but you can trust them to help you think.

And I was shocked at how much I could get insights on the most random business questions in only a few minutes. I’m Eric Garland. I’m an expert in competitive intelligence and strategy helping businesses look out at the future so they can compete better, make a lot of money, have more fun, conquer the world, all stuff you want to be doing. I’ve worked for everyone including Fortune 100 businesses, European royalty, and the Pentagon. But I also work with small businesses and local governments. And I’ve been thinking, how do you get those type of clients insights that are normally only available to much larger organizations? And I think we live in a low-key amazing time for that right now. I have a keynote speech I give called The Chaos Advantage in which I point out that you can’t wait for calm news cycles to compete.

In fact, the more messed up everything is, historically speaking, that’s the best time to make money and expand your empire. Anheuser-Busch got ahead in the beer business when its main product got banned for thirteen years during prohibition. Nokia launched into the cell phone business because its main customer, the Soviet Union, was suddenly collapsing. Royal Dutch Shell got ahead because of the 1970s oil crisis, not in spite of it. So when there’s a giant strategic disruption on the horizon, how do you take advantage of it? Cuz that’s what the most successful companies you know very often have done. So, there’s another issue. You probably aren’t a professional strategic intelligence analyst, nor do you employ one.

If you’re on a small business, you’re probably chief cook and bottle washer. So, you need to go to work, clean up the parking lot, look at the day’s customers and orders, call some suppliers, file some taxes, and somehow we expect you to create competitive strategies from scratch like you’ve got a consulting firm backing you that costs 20 grand a day. Not surprisingly, this seems kind of daunting. So, what can you do to think about making a strategy to deal with major disruptions? Not make the strategy itself. How do you even think about it? So, let’s just focus on that right now. What I’ve discovered is that if you use a few prompts with AI that a strategic intelligence expert might use, you can get very usable insights in seconds.

So, to help you get started, I’m going to show you what I got using this method the very first time I tried it. So, let’s imagine that you have a somewhat normal business, one that doesn’t normally employ its own strategic intelligence function. Wedding event planners. And let’s take an event from the headlines right now. The United States and Israel in conflict with Iran. As I record this video, everyone’s worried about the Straits of Hormuz and the potential impact of the conflict on oil prices. Now, how many event planners have the capability to form strategic scenarios and operational plans for how they deliver weddings the way the Pentagon might? I’m going to guess vanishingly few. This is what you got me for.

I’m going to show you the cheat codes. So, let’s get into Claude from Anthropic as our AI platform. I like it. It’s friendly. It’s pretty. But is it smart? So, with very little in the way of complicated prompts, I’m going to ask it to make a strategy for wedding event planners in case of oil shock. I’m going to ask it to calculate how you might make a future-proof strategy around oil in case the Straits of Hormuz remain all jacked up using three of the top business strategists in the world, Harvard’s Michael Porter, Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, and the fiercely independent Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Porter wrote the book on modern competitive strategy all the way back in the 1980s. Clayton Christensen did the most important follow-ups to Porter’s work in the 1990s, and Taleb wrote the most iconoclastic books about strategic thinking in the 2000s.

I’m not going to tell you all about their intellectual work right now. This is for small businesses who may not have time for that kind of stuff, but we’re going to ask Claude to make a strategy for a wedding planner taking into account those three strategists. Let’s see how we do. All right. All right, Claude, show us what you can do here, buddy. This is live. It’s exciting, right? Now, this is the whole sentence I’ve done. Analyze the effect of oil price disruption on the wedding event planner business. Do one analysis using Porter, one with Christensen, and one with Taleb. Woohoo! Check out what we get right away, kiddos. Anal- analysis one, Porter’s five forces. So, this is cool. If you’re like me in the strategic intelligence world, you know about Porter’s five forces, which is, of course, suppliers, uh current competitive royalty rivalry, substitutes, new entrants, and buyer power.

Claude has done us a super pretty chart that you would need to pay some nerd a lot of money for, and it shows us what the implications in general are of the oil shocks on on the wedding business. So, they it says off off the cuff, and I haven’t read this stuff yet. Supplier power rises sharply with oil being shocked. Uh Let’s see. Substitutes DIY weddings surge. So, if things get too expensive, people will probably issue wedding planners. Buyer power rises as budgets shrink. Um wedding planner and competitive rivalry. All right, cool. Let’s see how it analyzed this. Supplier power dramatically increased. In Porter’s framework, a suppliers gain leverage when their input costs become valuable volatile and non-substitutable.

Oil disruption ripples through every vendor a wedding planner depends on. Florists, caterers, transportation and heating, linen rental companies. So, So, guys, the um my point today is not the specifics of the wedding event planning industry and how the war in Iran might impact it. My point today for you is you’ve got an application that you can download for nothing. You put in a couple sentences, and this is how fast this stuff will will come out at you. And the thing about Michael Porter and Clayton Christensen and Nicholas Nassim Nicholas Taleb is they’ve been around for years, and these large language models have had time to digest whether they’re violating copyright or not or trademarks or whatnot.

They they’ve had time to digest the work out there in thousands of different uh papers. And so, when you ask it a question about a business strategy here, what comes out very quickly is pretty good. So, you got Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, and it’s his disruption theory. Th- This AI stuff will make a pretty coherent chart about who is sensitive to oil shocks and not. And this is the wedding planning business. They They don’t have time to hire dudes from London and New York and and Berlin to to analyze what the impact of the the oil business is going to be on them. And and that’s my the whole point today is that with AI you can be looking at Nassim Taleb’s fragile, robust, and antifragile uh frameworks here.

This is the real point. This took a minute and a half to spit out. That we live in a time where our technologies are condensing and reframing all the output of all these thinkers from the 20th and 21st centuries. And if you are a business person of any size with any amount of resources, you can use these technologies to engage with these thinkers or other thinkers out there. I mean, heck, you could ask what Socrates and Plato think about oil shocks. It It may or may not be coherent, but it’d probably be fun and thought-provoking. And this is what I mean in the chaos advantage, my keynote speech, about how you don’t have to wait for things to be calm and you can start thinking about these uh more esoteric challenges today.

Uh in the in the case of the Iran-US Israel real conflict right now, we are rewriting some of the script around geopolitics right now. We are changing the map. We are changing how America deals with NATO and the United Nations. And uh the the Trump administration is making very dramatic decisions. And now Iran doesn’t have any missiles or a navy anymore. So, things are going to change over there. And that that’s going to change where China gets its petroleum from, that’s going to change the relationship between us, Israel, the Arab Gulf states. There’s a lot going on. And that is going to affect every business. But you don’t have to be helpless if you are uh in charge of a small business, or if you work for a huge company, and you’re in a single department.

You can use tools to help you think about these these individual, maybe disparate um factors that would go into making a larger strategy. And I hope that this kind of technique is cheap, cheerful, and fun. A way that you can grab a couple of headlines, ask these tools, “Hey, how does this uh you know, apply to my widget company?” And you’ll get an answer. And you can take that answer, and you can run out to the water cooler, and you can have a short discussion. Not all of these things need to be year-long, super difficult uh strategy projects. They don’t need to to cost seven to nine figures in uh in budget. You can just do them today. And I that’s that’s why I do what I do in Future Intelligence.

Is I try and take the most sophisticated techniques in the world that we’ve come up with, and give them to you, because they are not that hard. So, I’m Eric Garland, and you can catch me uh competitivefutures.com. Please uh hit like, subscribe, all that good stuff. What are your questions about uh other tools how that you might use? Hit me up in the comments. Thanks.